Of Love and Lions
by of-the-tree-of-knowledge
Summary: "My Name is Cara Oakley, the fifth member of the Marauders. And this is our story" From the summer before 7th Year to J and L deaths, follow the friends as they enter a world many no longer recognise, and deal with the problems it throws at them.
1. Chapter 1

**24****th**** December 1981**

Someone once told me that you are never as broken as you think you are. I sincerely hope that they are right.

My whole world as I knew it has changed, been flipped on its side by the decisions made by one man, if you could even call him that. It amazes me how one person can cause so much pain and destruction to so many people. Everyone has been affected by this, by one idea that infected the minds of people and grew out of control.

My family is dead. Almost all of my friends have also perished, fighting for the cause. Fighting for the good cause, the right cause. They were all so young, too young to die the way they did. And I am one of the few left. I am left to pick up the pieces, to try and make a life for myself. I have to console families, attend funerals and help to catch the last of the few of the sick, twisted people who brought this, or helped to bring this around. The real scum of the earth.

Life is difficult at the moment. The all consuming grief and betrayal has so far not faded with time, and I miss them all. So much.

When Christmas day comes tomorrow, I will not celebrate, instead I will sit and remember my friends, my family and their lives. I will wonder to myself what might have been, and I will tell you all their entire story, as they would have wanted it to be told. I'll tell you the truth, some of it good, someone of it gut wrenchingly bad.

My name is Cara Oakley, and I was the fifth marauder. And this is our story.


	2. Chapter 2

"_Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world.__" – Sylvia Plath._

**Chapter One**

Although our story really starts much, much before this date, I want to take you all back to August 1979 …

The weather that summer was particularly awful; the sun was rarely out and it rained almost continually for weeks at a time. Inconvenient as it was too many people, this was particularly inconvenient to James Potter; he had a Quidditch team he planned to lead to victory this year, and he needed to be able to get out and properly try out some of his strategies. His bedroom was full of drawings and diagrams of Quidditch pitches and broomsticks, and not being able to put any of these ideas into action was making him irritable.

His mother was avoiding him, his father (although he worked the majority of the time anyway) was staying well clear, and his best friend (more like a brother) who lived with him was staying longer at his place of work than entirely necessary. James knew that he was taking his frustration with the weather out on everyone else, and he kept trying to stop himself, but he felt so pent up in the house, being able to fly the way he wanted, that he could no longer help it.

James flopped back on his bed half in frustration, half in genuine anger, and growled at nothing in particular. If the Slytherin's beat his team in the first match of the year because the weather had stopped him from practising, James would not be at all impressed. It was to be his last year at Hogwarts, and his last chance to lift the cup as Captain of the Gryffindor team. The previous year, the first of his captaincy, half of his first team squad had gone down with a mysterious sickness bug 12 hours before the match, meaning that Ravenclaw had just managed to pip them to the championship. _But not this year, _James thought to himself, _this year we will win. _

From his place in the middle of his untidily made (definitely not to his mum's standard) bed, James could see how much of a mess his bedroom was. Spell books were littered across the large desk that took up most of the opposite wall, discarded pages of notes and random items of clothing and towels were strewn across the floor. For the first time ever, James was pretty sure that his bedroom was messier than Sirius', and that was quite an achievement, even if it was one so disgusting that it made James physically shudder. Just as he was contemplating getting up and tidying up a bit before his mum saw the state of the place, there was a knock at his bedroom door.

James was on his feet in less than a second; his wand, which had been stashed safely in his dressing gown pocket, in his hand. There was no one in the house, and he therefore had no idea who was knocking on his door. Steeping slightly towards his closed balcony doors and to the left, so he was in the centre of his room, James waited. There was another knock, slightly louder this time.

"James? I know you're in there. You seriously cannot still be asleep!" the familiar voice called through the door. "That's it, I'm coming in," the voice said more to herself than to anyone else.

"Oh, it's you," James said, before the person behind it had even revealed themselves fully. He visibly relaxed once he knew who was at his door, and as she came into the room, he was putting his wand away again.

"James Potter! If your father could see you putting your wand away without checking who I am he would go mad!" she exclaimed, in mock chastisement.

"Fine, If you insist," he said. He cleared his throat, fully aware that she was now looking around his room with disgust at the mess everywhere. "What colour underwear were you wearing the first time Sirius used a wind charm to lift up your skirt?"

"White," she said, and even though James had been almost one hundred percent sure that it was really her, it was good to be sure.

"Excellent," he said, throwing himself back down on his bed on his stomach.

"Oh, don't be too excited to see me," she said, pushing some dirty clothes off of James' leather desk chair and onto the floor so that she could sit down.

"It's not that its not good to see you Cara," he said, turning his head so that he was at least facing in her direction," It's more that I saw you yesterday, and today, I just want to sit here and be pissed off."

James had in fact, seen Cara the day before. He had been in Diagon Alley, visiting Sirius on his lunch break from his job at the Leaky Cauldron, when he had stopped by and spent the afternoon whilst Sirius went back to work, in Fortescue's ice-cream parlour, keeping Cara company whilst she worked the afternoon shift. It had been pretty quiet in there, due to the bad weather, so Cara and James had worked on a new Quidditch training schedule for the new school year.

"Weather still getting you down?" she asked, as she absentmindedly brushed some drops of rain off of her dark blue cloak and onto the floor.

"How can the weather not get me down?" he mumbled, "It's raining so bad out there that just standing on the balcony is probably enough to ensure that I'm drowned."

"Oh, stop being melodramatic!" said Cara, flicking some rain water in James' direction, "think of it this way, I'd rather drown in water than my own self pity."

James didn't have a smart answer to that, so he didn't answer her at all. Although he would never admit it, that was one of the problems with girls; they were usually right about these sorts of things.

A silence fell between the two friends who had known each other from birth. James, an only child, was the son of the Head of the Auror department Eric Potter, and Cara, the eldest of three children, was the daughter of the deputy Head of Magical Law Enforcement, Sam Oakley. The two men had an interesting work dynamic, at work, they were constantly at loggerheads, arguing about the best methods to get the job done. Outside of work, they were good friends despite there considerable age difference.

"I need to ask you something," said Cara after a few minutes of the almost comfortable silence. The serious tone of her voice got James' attention immediately. That voice was saved for important conversations.

"Sure, what's up?" he asked, sitting up and leaning against the gold and red decorated wall behind him.

"It's about," she started, and shook her head slightly as she changed her mind. "You know my dad's assistant, Egbert Thebes?"

"Yeah," said James slowly, wondering where this conversation was going.

"Well, I overheard my dad and your dad talking about him yesterday, after I got home from work," she said. James nodded for her to continue. James didn't see anything alarming about their fathers talking to each other, but he knew that Cara would soon be getting to her point.

"Anyway, they were talking about how Dumbledore and the order suspect that he is a spy for the other side. I mean, I've know for years and years that he wasn't a nice man, hell, everyone knows that he's a nasty piece of work, but a spy?"

James let her finish her rant before she spoke. He could well believe that the slimy git that was Egbert Thebes was a spy for the other side. He had (according to James' father anyway) always been a brown noser, trying to get his fingers in lots of different pies. However, James could see Cara's point; if he was a spy, that meant that both Sam Oakley, and the information that he received and gave out as a senior ministry member was being passed on. Pretty much everything at the ministry nowadays involved Law Enforcement, and therefore nothing, and no one was safe if there was a spy in that office.

"I can quite believe it actually," James told Cara, and just as he was about to justify this statement, she said, "Oh, me too." Once again, they were both on the same page.

"Did you hear what tey were planning to do?" James asked, now grasping the seriousness of the situation. Everyone that came into close contact with Thebes, such as there fathers, were in immediate danger should it be uncovered that they knew he was a spy.

"No, but I can assume that they'll just filter information? Oh, Prongs, I don't know, and as if I wasn't worried about it all enough in the first place!" she said, rubbing her temple with her hands.

Her father's job had been a lifelong source of worry for Cara. Her mother had left her and her father almost the minute she was born, and had not been heard of since. Therefore, Cara grew up either at the Potter's, the Magical Law Enforcement office or in the care of Betsy, their much loved house elf when her father was putting in the necessary hours that his job required. The worry that one day, her father might not come home had never been lessen for Cara, and after several close calls and hospital stays over the years, she had good reason to worry. Cara loved her dad dearly, and he loved her just as much, but they had both grown to have some what separate lives once she left for Hogwarts. When Sam remarried when Cara and James were thirteen, she could not have been happier, until her twin brother and sister, Jack and Jane, were born the following summer. Cara and her family had a great life, but as James was well aware from the goings on in his own house, when things are great, there is a lot to loose.

"Grey," he said, addressing her by her marauder name, "It will be alright. Dumbledore's working on ways to make it better, to defeat _him. _People like our dad's, and everyone in the order, are working everyday to make it better." For a moment, James had almost convinced himself, but then he looked back out at the rain, and was reminded that what was going on in the magical world around them now was only the very beginning of the storm that was definitely still to come.

Cara nodded, and then looked around James room again. James knew that she was finished with that topic of conversation.

"I'm not being funny or anything," said Cara after a moments pause, her tone completely different then before, "but can I open the balcony door? You room reeks of boy."

James raised her eyebrows at her, and then they both laughed as he opened the door himself.

"So," said Cara, who was gulping in the fresh air with abandon, what's new with you?"

James knew that that was Cara code for 'Have you had a reply to the letter you sent to Lily yet?'. At the beginning of the school holidays, James had decided that he was done with chasing Lily Evans. He had decided, with a little help from the other marauders, that he would send Lily a letter, telling her this, and apologising for his previous actions. He had sent that on the first day of the holidays, and now, almost two months later, he had still had no reply.

"Nope, nothing," he told Cara.

"To be fair to Lily, it wasn't the kind of letter that needed a reply," Cara told James.

Sticking up for the different girls in the other marauders lives was something that Cara did when she saw fit. If one of the boys was in the wrong, she had no qualms about setting them straight, whatever the subject matter was. This caused many an amusing argument between Sirius, the self labelled ladies man, and Cara, our resident feminist.

For the second time that day, James had nothing to add to that comment. She was right, but still, James would have liked some kind of acknowledgement. Sensing his annoyance at no reply start to rise again, Cara added, "After all, she wouldn't want to make your 'arrogant and over inflated head' any bigger." There was silence for a moment, and then the two friends began to laugh.

When Cara left half an hour later, James tidied his room using magic. He knew it was lazy, but he just couldn't be bothered. As he did it, he thought more about what Cara had told him. The consequences of such a thing were unimaginable, and he knew now that he would dread the day the information that had undoubtedly already accumulated would be used against them all.

The sounds of Sirius arriving home through the fireplace reminded James of just how deep this hatred that _he_ seemed to have went. Later that night as he walked into his fathers study for their daily catch-up, and looked at the photographs on the mantelpiece of people who had already died fighting for the right cause, he was reminded of just how long this storm had been brewing for.


End file.
